Wonderware Names Longwatch as Certified Software Partner

Wonderware Software Partner's products are endorsed or certified by Wonderware to be applications with proven compatibility with Wonderware software. Certified software partners have access to Wonderware Beta programs, toolkits and senior technical support people so they can integrate and extend Wonderware software on an ongoing basis.

The Longwatch Video Surveillance System has been integrated with Wonderware’s InTouch HMI, Active Factory, Historian and MES software in several applications. The combination of Wonderware software and Longwatch Video systems allows operators in process control applications to see live and archived video from the plant floor directly on their Wonderware HMI screens. This allows operators to “see” what is going on in a process plant or factory without having to send someone to the scene. The operator can also “rewind” the video to see what happened a few seconds or a few hours before an incident.

By integrating with the Wonderware ActiveFactory trend chart object, Longwatch Video Historian software simultaneously shows trend graphs of user-selected variables (displayed as color “pen” lines) with archived video. The video panel and trend chart can be “linked” (synchronized) with the click of a button on the Viewer display. When the user clicks and drags the chart object’s time cursor (normally used only for displaying the process variable’s engineering units value and status at a selected point in time), the Video Historian also moves the video forward or backward accordingly.

“The integration of plant video with Wonderware’s powerful and flexible ActiveFactory chart brings new capabilities for monitoring and controlling manufacturing,” said Tom Barczak, marketing manager for Insource Solutions, a Wonderware distribution partner. “In a matter of no time, we were able to interweave the trends of Wonderware ActiveFactory with the video from Longwatch to provide a picture of production and operations that revealed the ‘Rest of the Story’ and led to more rapid improvement. The applications for Longwatch appear endless for security, operations, production, MES, batch tracking and quality applications. Definitely, it’s a technology that delivers rapid results.”

When Longwatch Operator Console Monitoring software is employed on a Wonderware system, everything that appears on the HMI—and everything the operator enters from the keyboard or mouse—is logged as a video stream, so a plant can “play back” everything that happened during an incident or event for analysis or training purposes.

“We are very pleased with the Wonderware certification,” says Steve Rubin, president of Longwatch. “We’ve been working with Wonderware channel partners for several years, and we have several installations in water, power and pipeline systems that combine our video systems with Wonderware HMI/SCADA software. Achieving this certification delivers even more confidence and value with automation and process control end users.”